Items

An Item represents any tangible or intangible product or service that has business context within any system that makes use of the Fulfillment Subscriber Inventory in the enterprise. This includes both OSS and BSS layers, as well as systems outside these domains. An item is identified with a unique identifier called an itemId. This identifier must be globally unique within the item domain and can be specified externally or generated by the Fulfillment Subscriber Inventory system as required.

Typically an item will represent any one of the following types of entities:

  • Customer-Facing Service (CFS)
  • Resource-Facing Service (RFS)
  • Bundle
  • Product
  • Device
  • Service
  • Tariff
Note: The mentioned list is not an exhaustive list of item types. Within the Fulfillment Subscriber Inventory system, an item is a generic object which has a type and subtype classification scheme. Users are free to define their own categories within this scheme, with the one limitation that each item must have a globally unique itemId.

Fulfillment Subscriber Inventory also provides the ability to manage a limited set of information that describes an item in the form of characteristics. These characteristics are name-value pairs which describe attributes of the item. Each characteristic is identified with a unique identifier called a characteristicId. This identifier must be unique within the scope of any given item instance and can be specified externally or generated by the Fulfillment Subscriber Inventory system as required.

The system also provides the ability to link an item to a list of orders that have interacted with the item. This could be considered an order audit log of changes to the item over its life cycle. Each order is identified with a unique identifier called an orderId. This identifier must be unique within the scope of any given item instance and must always be specified externally. This means multiple items can refer to the same order, but the same order may not appear on one item more than once.

Items may have relationships to other items, so the Fulfillment Subscriber Inventory system provides the capability of linking items together using relationships. These relationships do not enforce referential integrity and are keyed on a combination of the relationship type and the primary key of both the parent and child item entities, specifically the itemId. These values must be unique for any given item and must be specified externally.

There is also the capability of locking item objects within the Fulfillment Subscriber Inventory system. Each lock is identified with a unique identifier called a key. This identifier must be unique within the scope of any given item instance and must always be specified externally.

  • Adding a New Item
    To add a new item perform the following steps:
  • Searching an Item
    You can search an Item using the common search bar. See Searching Items and Parties for more details. You can use the basic navigation buttons like Previous and Next to locate the desired item. You can also search for an item using the search feature. To search for an item from the Item menu perform the following steps:
  • Updating an Item
    To update an existing Item, perform the following steps:
  • Locking an Existing Item
    Locks can only be added to an existing item. To add a lock to an existing item perform the following steps:
  • Deleting the Lock of an Item
    To delete the lock of an item, perform the following steps:
  • Deleting an Existing Item
    To delete an existing item, perform the following steps: